There is a lot of talk about growth this month on Russian adoption blogs and e-mail groups.

On "Bringing Ivan Home" Denise writes about her son's first doctor visit and how much he has grown since coming to America in January. Over at Yahoo!'s Sakhalin Island Adoption Group, Liane, Sue and Bette are celebrating height and weight milestones for kids that remain, nonetheless, smaller than American-born kids their age.

That's pretty much my situation. At 15 months when I got his referral, my older son was about the size of an American six month old. When I sent his background material to an adoption medicine doctor, the assessment came back bleak: Failure to thrive, I was told, a bad marker for future development. On this doctor's traffic-light rating scale, he was rated "yellow but closer to red".

But wait. I had a video of this kid. In it, he was walking well and showed a lot of inquisitiveness about the world around him. Was he really "yellow but closer to red"?

So I got on the Internet. This was back in the dark days, pre-Google. Every growth chart I found was for American-born kids, and they were huge in comparison. The only study I found that purported to follow failure-to-thrive kids was based on a dismally small group. Finally I turned back to my agency, which put me in touch with five families that had brought home similarly small kids. After hours on the phone, I was convinced that small wasn't so bad after all. Dear doctor, if you are reading, my son is still one of the smaller kids in class, but he's also one of the strongest and most agile, and smart as a whip.

But since I am going to have a few bones to pick down the road with scientific studies that use statistically insignificant groups, I'm not going to extrapolate too much from my group of one. You don't have to either.

The University of Washington's Center for Adoption Medicine has a big section of growth information on adopted kids. There are U.S. growth charts, as well as more internationally minded charts from the World Health Organization. There are charts for Russian kids and those from six other countries, as well as preemies. There is also a substantial section on nutrition, that shares thoughts on vitamins and minerals, essential fatty acids and probiotics the doctors deem helpful for the health and growth of children who have been in orphanages.

It's interesting and helpful reading.